"Love for Love": Conceptual Unity and Idiomatic Difference in the Johannine Tradition

Abstract:The purpose of this essay is to discuss the theme of Johannine love
as it occurs in three writers: the proto-Reformer, Gabriel Biel
(1445-1495); the Cappadocian theologian, Gregory of Nyssa (335-395);
and the anonymous Syrian monk known to scholarship as Pseudo-Dionysius
("The Aereopagite": d. ca. 500). It is maintained that Biel, whose
works were influential especially among the Lutheran reformers, was the
last great representative of a tradition that wove together biblical
and patristic teaching on the theme of divine love and its relation to
grace. Following a survey of Biel's teaching, the theme is explored in
the earlier writers and contrasted with the Neoplatonic (philosophical)
and Gnostic (theological) treatments.

It is argued that while the
proto-reformer's idiom is considerably different from the patristic
development, his approach to the theme represents a consistent
idiomatic interpretation of the Johannine motif of the love of God, one
that can be traced through patristic authorities as diverse as Clement
of Alexandria and Augustine and later writers ranging from Duns Scotus
to Peter Lombard. It is also maintained that this view of love differs
from alternative, especially Gnostic treatments in adhering to a
relational rather than distantial view of the God and the world.

I. Introduction

Despite the relative disuse
of the church fathers by the sixteenth century Reformers and their
reasons for it, a neglect which endured in some circles until the
Oxford Movement redeemed the study of patristics, [1] it is reasonably
clear that the church fathers were as much attached to the Bible as to
philosophy. [2] When Calvin writes in condescension of Catholic
tradition, that the scripture "has its authority from God and not the
Church" [3] and that the Romanists have "buried the clear sense of
scripture under the weight of human opinion" [4] he finds it necessary
to take on a central premise of the patristic era--in Augustine's
famous formula, "I would not believe the gospel if the authority of the
church did not compel me to do so." [5] Yet in tackling the premise as
he does, he also shows a clear knowledge and regard for Augustine's
views of the Christian doctrines of the trinity, faith, the nature of
the church, and the origins of sin. [6] Other reformers, even in
defense of protestant positions, would hold the teachings of the early
writers in even higher esteem. [7]

I mention this mindset at
the beginning of a discourse about a particular theme in patristic
studies, because the ambivalent view of the fathers which we have
inherited from the Reformation is as distant from our postmodern
apprehension of the provisionality of all texts and judgements as the
so-called regula fidei-the rule of faith invoked by the fathers against
the heretics-was provisional and distant to the Reformers themselves.
None of the magisterial reformers was ignorant of the early writers;
[8] if anything, they read them more assiduously and imaginatively than
did their Latin opponents, because in so doing they might find ancient
stores of rhetorical ammunition to fight modern battles. [9]

We also know that the
reformers, especially the Lutheran masters like Melanchthon, entered
into lengthy correspondence with eastern prelates, such as the letters
from the Tuebingen theologians to the Orthodox Patriarch Jeremias II,
at a time when dialogue between Rome and the eastern eparchies was icy
silence. The tone of these exchanges, as a number of scholars have
documented, was friendly, personal, and polite. In the beginning the
correspondence was both sincere and open-minded. [10] It is interesting
for example, that the Greek version of the Augsburg Confession which
accompanied the initial Lutheran letters was itself a very unusual
document - no mere translation but a significant re-working of the
Confession, with extensive additions in the Byzantine liturgical
language and references to those eastern fathers with whom the Orthodox
East would be most familiar. [11]

Georges Florovsky once
pointed out that the early Reformers had no intention of "innovating"
in doctrine. [12] They struggled to purify the Church of all those
innovations and additions which, in their opinion, had been accumulated
in the course of ages, particularly in the West. The eastern fathers as
the faithful guardians of an unmined and, from Rome's standpoint,
largely optional line of tradition could assist the Reformers in their
campaign for a restitutio christianismi - something Calvin
recurs to when he challenges Rome in this way: "I ask them, why do you
not mention Egypt, Africa and all Asia-Why do you not mention
Greece...where the succession of bishops has never been interrupted.
The [Romanists] make the Greeks schismatic-but with what right?" [13]

One of the themes that
dominates in this interchange, precious to both protestants in the west
and Christians in the east at a time when the destiny and autonomy of
the eastern church was marked by uncertainty, was the theme of "grace" (charis)
often (if unnecessarily) associated with the Lutheran reformers. In
fact, the theme became important to the reformers primarily because it
had already become important in late medieval theology. [14] The
earliest Catholic proto-reformers, used the biblical, patristic and
classical traditions without footnotes and without much regard for
mixing and melding ideas. Only later, following Luther, does the
patristic position lose rhetorical stature steadily in favor of the
biblical idiom, or "plainspoken" gospel-teaching among the Anabaptists
and "radical" reformers.

For that reason we need to
take one step behind Luther to the reign in Germany of the
proto-reformers who advocated reform of the church in head and members,
but who thought the ancient synthesis of philosophy and scripture, as
mediated by the church fathers was still possible. I have in view one
such writer: a 15th century precursor of Luther, the Tübingen
nominalist theologian Gabriel Biel. [15] In his 1460 work, "On the
Circumcision of the Lord," Biel mixes together in one lecture passages
from the Gospel of Matthew, anti-Jewish polemic, quotations from
Aristotle, a short tribute to Peter Lombard, a long passage from Duns
Scotus and an epilogue on certain problems with Augustine's doctrine of
grace and free will. I begin with that epilogue as a way into a
discussion of the theme of divine love and grace in the writings of the
eastern fathers, with special reference to two: Gregory of Nyssa and
the Syrian monk known to later generations as the Pseudo-Dionysius.

II. Gabriel Biel on God's Love: The Nexus between Scholastic Synthesis and Reform

In the discussing theme of divine charis, Biel writes as follows:

Grace prompts us to love
God above all things and in all things and to prefer the ultimate good,
God, ahead of one's self and everything else. Therefore all those
things which are not directed consciously or unconsciously towards God
do not come from the prompting of grace and therefore are not worthy of
eternal life.... According to some of the fathers... man can love God
above everything else with his natural powers alone [that is without
grace]...but man can never love God as perfectly and easily as with
grace. Moreover it is absolutely impossible for him to love God
meritoriously. [16]

There are a number of influences
competing for attention in this little passage on "meritorious love."
First, of course, is Paul's idea that since "sufficiency is from God,"
no act that is not prompted by grace can be meritorious (that is
adequate)-not even love. Implicit as well is Augustine's view that the
value of love must always be estimated in terms of its object, so that
a true love of God will always follow, and never exist without, a
conversion from the negative way of sin to the positive life that grace
makes available. [17] Second is a more tortured discussion of the
Lombard's, that meritorious acts-that is, an act which is conducive to
salvation-depends on two factors: the will being free and grace being
given: there is no "merit" in a love that does not operate freely.
Grace does not determine the will, it "disposes" it or "prompts" it to
do acts for the sake of God. A third source, used argumentatively, is
Augustine's famous image of the relation between grace and will being
akin to the relationship between a footservant to his lady: "The will
accompanies but does not precede grace." [18] Or it is like the
relation of a rider to his horse: As the rider guides the horse and
chooses the direction; so grace "steers" the will in the direction of
God. For Biel however, the Augustinian discussions of grace, upon which
so much of the later protestant traditions will depend, are
problematical: they are heavily biased in favour of the directive power
of grace, which is not voluntary, but far from clear about how this
additum actually works in relation to the will. In the first analogy,
grace tells its servant the will what it needs; in the second, analogy,
grace sits astride and will becomes a conveyance to be driven in the
right direction. Without denying the power of grace, which he sees
clearly attested in Paul, the Cappadocians, his scholastic mentors and
Augustine, Biel finds their implications uncertain.

Thus he moves outside his
stable of authorities to say something, in the context, almost radical
and certainly original: "It is clear," he writes, "that grace is nothing but infused love, because the same effects are attributed to both.
For love is that which prompts us to love God above everything else,
[and that] which makes us beloved to God. Now this is exactly what
grace does; therefore both holy scripture and the fathers identify love
with grace." Love and grace, he suggests "are exactly the same thing."
[19] This is an extremely provocative suggestion-but also one that many
of his fellow scholastics would have condemned. And do the fathers say
this explicitly? [20] In short, where does the idea come from?

* * *

From the fathers, Biel derives the idea that grace (charis) and love (agape)
are inseparable both conceptually and practically: It is impossible to
love God without grace, and impossible for grace to express itself in
any form but love. The reformer in Biel causes him to say that this
doctrine does not come only from the fathers but also from "reason
based on scripture." It comes, therefore, with the dyadic authority of
scripture and patristic opinion. He acknowledges a countervailing
opinion, associated with Duns Scotus, that one should, or could, make a
rational distinction between grace and love: grace referring to God as
the loving subject, and charity being used when God is the object of
love, or one acts towards others in the spirit of love.

So far we see in Biel's use
of a pallette of ancient writers and later teachers a desire to bring
scripture together with reason, and the fathers into their original
conjunction with scripture. This is no small project considering that
it is just this conjunction that the most radically biblicist of the
reformers would soon challenge. When it comes to distinguishing
Christian love from other forms of love-the love of God through which,
by a prevenient love called grace, we come to be "friends of God"- Biel
resorts not to the western tradition but to the eastern fathers. He
leaves Augustine to one side, particularly Augustine's idea that one
receives faith before grace ("How," he wonders, "would we have received
this grace? We cannot walk in faith without being in grace." [21]): So
while acknowledging that the love of God as subject might be configured
as Platonic love of the Good, Biel rejects the implications of this
teaching. He also rejects the idea that the assistance of grace might
be represented simply as acquired habit: He quotes Aristotle to this
effect when he writes, "Experience teaches us that all the acts of
virtue leave behind a capacity which allows us to do these acts with
greater care, readiness, pleasure and correctness." [22] But the
Aristotelian pattern only works analogously: The "habit of grace" (or
of loving) is not acquired but infused; grace "accomplishes in the soul
something similar to the effects of an acquired habit but in a far more
perfect fashion than an acquired habit." [23]

But Biel is deeply
immersed in the fathers, and from them he has accepted that the way in
which God is loved is somehow connected with the Christian experience
of God, an experience which he regards as essentially trinitarian. It
would remain so for the later reformers, though many would lose, or
deemphasize, both the patristic connections, and none quite manages to
achieve the "co-referential" style of Biel's discussion in their
defense of salvation through grace as an essentially unmerited gift
imparted to the sinner by a merciful (rather than a loving) God. [24]
Indeed the common direction of reformist theology after Biel has its
source in the lacuna between the concept of grace as a freely given and
unmerited gift and the concept of love as a rationale for grace. God
might give grace to what is unworthy, as one might pardon a criminal;
but this form of grace would not need love as a motive. What for Biel,
on the basis of patristic sources, is reciprocally active, that is,
"grace" as predisposing love, directed towards God and returned by God,
becomes unilateral-God's action on behalf of sinners-when the nuances
of patristic exegesis are omitted from the discussion. This point is
stressed in a famous passage from Melanchthon's 1531 apologia for the
Augsburg Confession (art. iv) to illustrate the general idiom following
the removal of the patristic authorities: "As long as man's mind...
does not feel God's wrath and judgement he can imagine that he wants to
love God and that he wants to do good for God's sake. In this way the
scholastics teach men to merit the forgiveness of sins by doing what is
within them, that is, if reason in its sorrow over sin elicits an act
of love to God or does good for God's sake. ... [And they teach that]
to support and increase trust in such works, God grants grace to those
who do this." [25]

In contrast, here is what
Biel has to say: "Love is the gift by which we are made good....Not
only is this gift more glorious than the others, it is so great that it
is never given unless the holy trinity gives itself with it. The
trinity never gives itself without this gift, nor the gift without
itself." [26]

III. The Johannine Pattern: "Love for Love"

Can we sort out the multiple
influences that are moving through this enormously rich but interwoven
work of late scholasticism which Luther is said to have read repeatedly
and assiduously? First of all, Biel is "Johannine," as most of fathers,
particularly in the eastern Church had been, in conceptualizing divine
love. This includes a certain program to which much of eastern theology
would find itself committed for five hundred years, at least to the
time of John of Damascus (d. 749). [27] It involves a peculiar
understanding of the way in which love (agape) works within the human
community: Given the syncretism of much contemporary Christian
theology, we may be tempted to see this as a Pauline leitmotif (cf. 1
Cor 13.8), but the Johannine form of koinonia, which is often seen as
cultic rather than ecclesial, is much more explicitly related to a
trinitarian model of unity in multiplicity than Paul's view of the
community as being "saved"-at a social level--through the charis of
love. [28] The program is explicitly stated in 1 John 4.7-10, an
ancient Christian hymn dating from about 60CE and quoted by the author
of the epistle:

"Beloved (agapaetoi) let us love one another,
for love is from God. (agape ek tou theou estin)
Everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God.
He who does not love does not know God.
For God is love.
In one way has the love of God has been shown to us:
God sent his first, his only son into the world
so that we may live through him.
In this is the love: not that we have loved God,
but that he had first loved."

In this pattern, love is manifested in a
particular evocative act, not merely in a teaching. Love is
prophorikos-expressed. The community in some sense-not quite Gnostic
slumber-is incapable of knowing God except through this act, something
concrete and expressive. As in the Fourth Gospel, their minds are
clouded, hardened, predisposed to rejection of love (Jn 1.10). They are
also incapable of loving except in the knowledge that they are somehow
the objects of love. In crass last-century terms, they need affirmation
and unconditional love as a prerequisite to loving. The prevenient act
of grace - the disposing, assisting power--is this first act of love.
So why (asks Biel) not call "grace" love?

The Johannine program is
more radical in many respects than anything that comes after it because
of its flat identification of God, in process terms, as loving being:
hoti ho theos agape estin. As divine subject, using the rational
distinction Duns Scotus advocates, God gives himself in the act of
loving. As "object" however, he does not demand the kind of
contemplative love we associate, for example, with the neoplatonic and
gnostic traditions, where gnosis itself becomes, effectively, a form of
agape. In the Johannine pattern, God is known in loving (1 Jn 4.7-8);
whilst the God of Gnosticism is unknowable, "unloving" at a relational
level, and hence unlovable. Where radical Platonism and its religious
equivalent, Gnosticism, requires love of knowledge of the good, the
johannine program requires "love for love": "If God has so loved us, so
we ought to love one another." We love, says the author because God has
loved first, or has taken the risk of not being loved. "If we love one
another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. [29] In this
we know that we abide in him and he in us because he has given us his
Spirit. And we have seen and known that the father has sent his son."
Biel's trinitarianism is certainly of a more developed sort, but the
basic perception, which he claims to derive "from scripture and the
fathers" is fairly clear: the kind of love that is expressed in
Christianity is Trinitarian. It depends on the co-inherence of a loving
subject, an expression of that love, the Son, and the effects of love
in the form of the donum, the spirit of grace and truth. Love becomes the shorthand to express the economy of salvation. Love draws the soul to God.

IV. The Development of the Johannine Pattern: Gnostics, Gregory of Nyssa and the Pseudo-Dionysius
With the passage of time, two different interpretations of the
Johannine program emerged. One of those is the Gnostic program, which
we associate especially with Syria and upper Egypt from the second to
the fourth century-though elements lingered in Armenia until the 9th.
The other is the tradition of the fathers in a succession reaching from
Clement in late 2nd century Alexandria to John of Damascus in the 8th.
The gnostic pattern seems to show clear traces of a convulsive form of
neoplatonic thought possessed by a rhetorical complexity largely absent
in the orthodox sources-even though at a certain level of theosophical
speculation it is sometimes difficult to separate platonically informed
eastern Christian mysticism from scripturally influenced platonic
theology. It is also probable that there are historical intersections
between the Gnostic pattern and the Johannine pattern of development,
so that what emerges in eastern theology will be both constructive and
corrective-an attempt to preserve the high theology of the pattern
whilst discouraging the most extreme forms of platonic mythopoesis.

It has been known since the
time of the Cappadocians that one of the transmogrified sources of
Gnostic religion is Plotinus, or Plotinus as mediated by Porphyry. The
two key passages are to be found in book two of the Fifth Ennead, where
Porphyry discusses the so-called "procession of beings": "When
incorporeal hypostatic substances descend, they split up and multiply,
their power weakening, as they apply themselves to the individual. When
on the contrary they rise, they simplify, unite and their power
intensifies." [30] This process of "diremption," or splitting apart
into weakness, has its resolution in the process of "redemption,"
through which the many are restored to the All. In this scheme, the
first principle and the source of all that exists is the One; in
Gnosticism, it is variously the Pleroma, the All-Begetter, or simply
the Father. In both the Neoplatonic and Gnostic schools (as later in
Tillich's philosophy) this One can only be experienced as mystery,
since it is ontologically prior to what comes from it and hence beyond
being. In the Christian-gnostic form, the neoplatonic vision becomes
the rupture of the All which produces creation: the error of
multiplicity arises, and with it this world and being in this world.
Salvation, as we find it expressed classically in such tracts from
Upper Egypt as the Gospel of Philip or the Hypostasis of the Archons,
is to do with the reversal of the process through which multiplicity or
error comes into existence; in a sentence, salvation and redemption in
the Gnostic religion is the All's metaphorised love of itself and its
need to restore unity from the multiplicity that resulted from the
primal dispersion.

Christian sources, such as
the Fourth Gospel and Ephesians 6, might have been useful in providing
images for this belief, but Christian theology in general seems to have
recoiled from its implications, which are unmitigated in tracts such as
the Gospel of Truth, "The Father uncovers his bosom....; his bosom is
the holy spirit and reveals his secret-his secret is his son, so that
out of the father's bowels the Entirety might learn to know him and the
aeons might no longer be weary from searching for the Father." [31] In
gnostic thought, this ingathering of the dispersed elements of the One
can be imagined using a variety of myths, ranging from Sophia to
Pandora, to Adam and Christ. The point to be made is that the
mythological overlay is simply the verbal attire applied by Gnostic
teachers to a fundamentally world-negating theology in which the
disappearance of the material world is the fundamental doctrine. [32]
The complexity, or what Irenaeus sees as the weed-like profusion of
Gnostic beliefs, often makes the original Neoplatonic pathway difficult
to detect.

What concerned the church
fathers, however, was not that they saw contortions of the Parmenides
or Porphyry in Gnostic writings, but rather the radical metaphysical
split which would have to be enforced if gnosticism became a way of
thinking about God: Since it transcends being or even negates being
altogether, the One or the All-Father is prior to thought and language
and cannot be expressed by them. [33] The Gnostic idiom was contrived
to make this explicit. [34] The One can only be perceived in mystical
glimpses, and then only by the true Gnostics, the teletoi, who have
reached a point that puts them at the summit of being, the "noetic
self" as distinct from the "hylic" or earthbound man. When the Gnostic
descends again to the human plane, he finds it impossible to express
the absolute truth. For the "orthodox" Christian in the age of the
fathers, this system is the radical negation of a God who wills,
creates, loves (and invites love), from a world in which he has some
interest. If theodicy, radical revision (or rejection) of the
mystagogical elements of Plato's teaching were the price one had to pay
for preserving the marriage of faith and reason in defense of biblical
revelation, it was a price most of the orthodox eastern writers were
willing to pay.

Gregory and the East: Differentiation from Gnosticism:
The eastern fathers were far more comfortable than western teachers, at
least until we get to Augustine, with the implications of Neoplatonism.
When the Cappadocians begin their work, the most persistent Gnostic
schools were already on the retreat, and with them the theological
commitment to the idea that God's love is available to the created
world only in a mitigated or metaphorical sense. [35] No-one is more
comfortable with neoplatonism than Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) who had
read his Porphyry and debated with the future (and last) of the pagan
emperors, Julian the Apostate, when they were at school together in
Constantinople. His treatise "On the Soul and the Resurrection"
displays a remarkable ability to travel between philosophy and
scripture and from didacticism to mysticism.

For Gregory, love is the
energy of the soul: it propels it towards its object-the Good-as like
to like, the divine returning to the divine. The soul copies or
iconizes the life which is above, the divine life, and this means that
its good is above all particular goods. If the language we find in
Gregory exploits neoplatonism, it does not devolve into deliberate
nonsense or what the Gnostics called "approximation": "The Divine
nature is beyond any particular good and to the Good the good is an
object of love. It follows that when it looks within itself, it wishes
for what it contains and contains that which it wishes and admits
nothing external. Indeed there is nothing external to it except evil,
which (strange to say) possesses an existence in not existing at all."
[36] For Gregory, the soul moves naturally toward the good (the
familiar theme is that of ascent), cleansed in its path of all that is
foreign to it-"things and emotions incident to its nature."

Here too, the theme might
well be Gnostic-the redemption of Sophia, for example, or the retrieval
of the pearl in the famous hymn enclosed in the Acts of Thomas or the
Coptic treatise called "On the Resurrection." But there is this
exception: for Gregory there is one thing left in the soul which is not
"incidental" to its nature and so is different from memory, emotion,
and hope, its temporal acoutrements: [37]

None of its habits are
left to it except love, which clings by natural affinity to the
Beautiful. For this is what love is, the inherent affection towards a
chosen object. When then the soul having become simple and single in
form and so perfectly godlike, finds that perfectly simple and
immaterial good which is really worth enthusiasm and love, it attaches
itself to it and blends with it by means of the activity and movement
of love, fashioning itself according to that which it is continually
finding and grasping. [38]

The authority for this idea,
however, is not Plotinus but Paul: Paul has announced, Gregory says,
that faith and hope endure alongside love for a little while, but that
love "the foremost of all excellent achievements" will endure forever.
Love therefore belongs particularly to the soul in a way that other
virtues do not. It is eternal, as hope cannot be, and as faith need not
be. In fact, it is the individuating feature of the soul which permits
it to be transformed (or remade) into the essential godlike thing it is
by nature. But the perception rests on the Johannine idea, the
mysterion, that "God is love." Love therefore explains relation and
likeness, where Gnosticism emphasizes unrelatedness and remoteness-the
"distantial." [39] Gregory expresses it this way: "The life of the
supreme being is love, seeing that the beautiful is necessarily lovable
to those who recognize it, and God does recognize it, so this
recognition becomes love, which he recognizes being essentially
beautiful." [40] The life of God has its activity in love; the soul
conforms itself to this life through love.

Dionysius, The Aereopagite: Divine Love.
Passing over contributions to the discussion made, in the context of
the Christological controversies by the Syrian fathers such as Thedoret
and the Alexandrians, especially Cyril, we come upon the most famous-if
alas anonymous-explicator of the Johannine tradition, Dionysius the
Areopagite. Whoever the author may have been, the fact that his letters
are addressed to various first century Christians including Timothy and
the apostle John suggests that his goal was to infuse fourth century
orthodox Trinitarian ideas into the first age of Christian teaching.
History has forgiven him this indiscretion. Dionysius presents another
example of how Neoplatonism might be pressed into the service of
Christian doctrine without devolving linguistically and conceptually
into the turgid language of Gnosticism or the developed forms of the
hesychast tradition represented much later (14th century) by Gregory
Palamas. Dionysius' basic premise, like Gregory's, is Johannine: God is
love and all love is from God-to use his liturgically charged
expression, love is "from him, through him, and to him." [41] When he
deals with the classical platonic problem of unity and multiplicity, he
does so in a way which makes love the energy which overcomes
separations and divisions: "Because of the divine love, the unities of
the world are mightier than the divisions." That is, God is not divided
and dispersed, or opposed to the world, but operates through the
energeia of love to provide coherence in the world. As a matter of
theological emphasis, the writer has transformed the Gnostic emphasis
on the primordial error as the source of diremption and separation into
the theme of divine love as the correction which makes all things one
in God. If the conceptual matrix is similar to the softer forms of (for
example) Valentinian speculation, the theological emphasis on love as a
principia efficians is rooted in the Gospel tradition and not in Syrian
dualism.

Certain aspects of this
explication of the Johannine pattern however are worked out uniquely by
Dionysius: the dominant theme, of course, is the familiar one of union
with God-the end of love. This leads to his most famous discussion and
one which will become in varying degrees programmatic for eastern
theology: divinization or theosis. This is not merely life with God but
godlike life: [42] Salvation means a form of deification, if by that
term we understand the fullest possible likeness to God and
participation in the divine life. Even this is less Gnostic, depending
on one's view of the Fourth Gospel, than Johannine. [43] But this
deification is not enfigured, in Gnostic language, as an ingathering of
the dispersed into the One: In his treatise "On the Divine Names,"
which has had perhaps the greatest influence on near eastern theology
both within and beyond Christianity, Gregory argues that the approach
to God is "through a pure heart and a spirit prepared for oneness."

The love of God is
expressed in prayer through which "he seems to come to us," when "we
really go to him." The imagery he uses to pursue his idea is memorable:
It is "as if climbing hand over hand by a chain let down from heaven we
appear to be drawing the sky downward instead of ourselves upward."
[44] For Dionysius, not only the path to salvation but theology itself
(the contemplation of God) begins with prayer: But beyond this first
approach, there are three paths; the linear (by which we move from a
knowledge of external things to a knowledge of causes); the spiral, by
which we approach God through dialectic and reasoning); and the
circular, in which we turn away from external things, abandon the mode
of formal reasoning, and "enter into the mystical oneness." This last
way of course, continues the thread of neo-Platonism, especially
Porphyry's, that begins with Clement of Alexandria [45] and extends to
John of Damascus and beyond: that is, God is utterly "unlike",
incomprehensible, and "apart."46 The Johannine theme that "No one has
seen God," is radicalized here, such that even the biblical stories of
appearances of God cannot be taken prima facie: they are allegories of
human encounter with the divine or the angelic, thus prefigurative or
moral rather than literal. This sense of "god beyond being" can result
in some disturbing language: God is "without imagination, opinion,
reason and intelligence; ...without number, or order, or greatness or
littleness, ...; it is not being nor eternity nor time; it is not
perceived by the mind; it is neither knowledge nor truth...; it is not
spirit as we know it nor sonship nor fatherhood...nor can it be in any
way affirmed or denied." [47] This is one of the closest approaches in
Christian theology after the time of the Alexandrians to the Gnostic
use of approximation as a theological idiom, but in its controlled form
it is what later writers, including scholastics such as Biel, would
consistently employ as the via negativa. Notness is not naughtness: the
positive value of human experience is not denied, but shown in its
inadequacy as language struggles to reduce the incomprehensible to
comprehension.

What, we wonder, is the role
of revelation in this theology? Scripture expresses in an inadequate
way (indeed, he says a "mean and contemptible way") the purposes and
activities of God. It describes God only in terms of relations and acts
and never with ontological precision. [48] Biblical revelation
"symbolizes" the reality of God as "goodness, knowledge, wisdom, life,
light, and beauty," as both the comprehension and source of these. But
the expression of these things comes through his primary activity,
love, which is active toward the world whilst knowledge is (and need
only be) active in relation to Himself. [49]

In the treatise "The
Celestial Hierarchies," Dionysius invents (or rather borrows from the
Neoplatonist Proclus) a chain of three triads that extend, as it were,
in a train of love from God to the world. The point of this hierarchy
is not to duplicate the archontic system of the Gnostics, giving it a
Christian twist, but to suggest how a synergy between the God who
reveals and the world that receives might be imagined: the hierarchy
exists to make God known through a process of imitation. Thus, the
triads, or angelic beings, are incited according to capacity to be like
God. This pattern of imitation is positively connected to the world,
where Gnosticism is pessimistically world-negating (distantial). [50]
Beneath the level of the divine triads, exist earthly hierarchies. The
ecclesiastical hierarchy for Dionysius is an earthly replica of the
divine. It includes what he calls the visible and tangible signs of
love, which equip us to rise above the things of earth and share in the
divine life. This path, it must be stressed is not knowledge-because
knowledge does not operate in relation to the incomprehensible God.
[51] This is a correction, if anything, of a Gnostic neoplationism
which sees knowledge as the means of spiritual perfection and reunion
with God.

Thus, "Revelation" for
Dionysius means that the "Unknown and Unseen God" has provided a way of
salvation based on the initiative of grace or love: The symbols of this
grace are the sacraments, which Dionysius artificially correlates with
the soul's ascent to god: baptism (purification); eucharist
(illumination); and unction or confirmation (perfection). The
ecclesiastical hierarchy has little to do with sacred persons [52]: he
scarcely mentions the church. Nor is there anything here which is not
already known to the Christian sacramental and liturgical practice of
the second century. What Dionysius provides is the chain of love that
links earthly semblances to heavenly reality. In short, like Gregory,
his fundamental axiom is the relatedness of the soul to God, its
capacity for response, almost with vibrational intensity, once its
inclinations are aroused, and not the cosmic tragedy of separation and
dispersion. Love is the activity which makes the divine real in the
world and draws the soul towards God.

V. Conclusion: Love Patristic, Medieval and Reformed?

To tie these reflections on
Christian love together in reverse order: If the Johannine tradition is
a starting point for eastern speculation on love, it has two
implications: that the love of God involves a divine-human reciprocity
which is initiated by an expression of God's being, and a second theme:
that God is only known through such expressions. The Johannine
community may or may not have been consciously involved in remodelling
certain Gnostic themes, but key among those challenged by emergent
orthodoxy is the theme that love is merely the divine being's
self-apprehension, that creation is an expression of primal error
(diremption) and that redemption is simply the restoration of the One.
But there is little of any perdurant significance in Gnostic literature
to equate to the social-cultic discussions of (e.gg.) John 15.11-17 or
1 John 4.7-10, with their stress on the efficacy of love and the
obligations congruent with those effects.

In Dionysius the attempt is
made to interpret the Johannine tradition in mystical terms. Scripture
is a mystery beneath which the reality of God is hidden, just as Jesus
is the image of the invisible God. Dionysius gives us a world of
figures, images and names, none of which tell us what God really is.
Our recourse, therefore is to love God, and this is expressed through
prayer and sacramental life. In Gregory, we feel we are on more solid
ground, at least with respect to the doctrine of love; but in fact
Gregory's mysticism is real and profound. Where Dionysius emphasizes
the triadologically arranged chain that links the human to the divine,
Gregory deals with the soul's ascent as motion or motivation: it is the
soul described by Porphyry in the Isagoge. [53] This soul is
drawn to God by the power of the one energy left to it after
imperfections have been sloughed away, namely the dynamic power of
loving (here understood essentially as attraction, since emotion has
been eliminated) which it receives from God. The soul is formed,
shaped, and modified in the image of God.

And finally our late
medieval and scholastic friend, who stands at the crossroads of a
reformation and the end of an era. We began with Gabriel Biel as a
recipient of a long tradition of patristic opinion and scriptural
interpretation. But when we approach him from this end he is hard to
locate as the successor of patristic thought. Triads, the noetic self
and the mystagogic names of God are as far removed from him as he is
from the theology of an Elisabeth A. Johnson or Dorothee Soelle. It is
true that Biel's idiom sounds more like fifteenth century Germany than
fourth century Constantinople or Alexandria, and thus more like Luther
than the fathers whose authority he appeals to in defining grace,
justification, and faith. But the medium in this instance is not the
message: Biel's use of the fathers is really the last great
non-conciliar-that is non-dogmatic-use of their ideas prior to the
Reformation itself. By the time of Trent, as already in the East, they
had become the Holy Fathers, the source of orthodoxy and tradition,
[54] whose authority was either assumed or rejected depending what side
of the divide one was on. Biel sees things simply; Grace is another
name for the love infused into the soul which makes us "good": he would
never revert to a term like "theosis"-divinisation--to express this,
but the process he imagines is equatable to the eastern patristic and
orthodox view of the earlier period. As a philosopher, he was well
versed in the scholastic approaches to Plato, but he dislikes
expressing the abstract in regressively abstract ways; so the Platonic
imagery which Dionysius tries to validate in a Christian idiom becomes
earthbound and homespun for Biel, whose idiom foreshadows Luther's: He
finds it possible to talk about friendhip, Freundschaft with God: how
could we remain in friendship without love? How could we be restored to
friendship without love? The journey of the soul to God, part to
wholeness, is now envisioned as the reunion of two lost friends : "God
might, he says, "have made us his friends without the gift of love. But
how could we have remained in friendship without the assistance of
love?" This restoration of the Johannine leitmotif is accomplished not
only outside the boundaries of the "radical" Platonic idiom with which
Biel's eastern progenitors felt comfortable, but through a
deplatonizing of the more extreme forms of the diom. It is a
restoration of theme, as well, because it evokes the straighforwardness
of the biblical idiom encountered in 1 John, and the simplicity of the
"Socratic" Plato in The Symposium: Thus asked what the "power" of love
is, Diotima replies, "[Love] interprets between God and men, conveying
and taking across to God the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men
the commands and replies of God; he is the mediator who spans the chasm
which divides them, and therefore in [Love] all is bound together, and
through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices
and mysteries [203a] and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find
their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the
intercourse and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is
carried on." [55]

Endnotes

[1] On the general subject of
the agenda of the Movement, see S. L. Ollard, A Short History of the
Oxford Movement (London: Mowbray, 1996), 150th Anniversary Edition.

[2] Instructive and
programmatic are Justin Martyr's words concerning his "conversion" from
philosophy to Christianity in The Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew, 3 and
Tertullian's more famous assertions in The Apology.

[6] Institutes 4. 57.7: "It
never occurs [to Augustine] to teach that the authority which we
ascribe to scripture depends on the definition or decree of men."

[7] Cranmer, whose
consistent references to patristic sources sometimes goes unmarked: see
for example, the liberal references to the Fathers in Cranmers's 1540
Preface to the Great Bible, especially his use of Gregory Nazianzus, in
G. Bray, Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1994), pp. 234-43.

[8] As a rule, the English
reformers and "explicators" were more prone than their Lutheran
counterparts to invoke the Fathers as authority: see for example
Cranmer's impressive array of citations from Hilary, Basil, Ambrose,
Augustine, Chrysostom and Photius in support of his view of
justification in his 1547 "A Sermon of the Salvation o9f Mankind." In
Gerald Bray, Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1994, pp, 315-317.

[9] It can be noted that
ecclesiastical history, as a distinct theological discipline had been
first introduced in the University curriculum in the West, first by the
Protestants, and precisely for polemical purposes against Rome. So the
crux of the heated political and religious debates between Rome and the
Reformers was whether or not Rome had been loyal to the ancient
tradition, or was guilty of innovations and unwarranted accretions. Cf.
Georges Florovsky, "The Orthodox Churches and the Ecumenical Movement
Prior to 1910" in A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 ed.,
R. Rouse and S.C. Neill (London, 1954) reprinted., Collected Works of
Georges Florovsky, Vol 2, Christianity and Culture (Belmont, MA:
Norland Publishing, 1974), pp. 169-170

[10] See generally on these
dialogues, Constantine N. Tsirpanlis "Jeremias II and the Lutherans"
from The Historical and Ecumenical Significance of Jeremias II's
Correspondence With the Lutherans (1573-1581) Volume One. (Kingston,
New York: American Institute For Patristic and Byzantine Studies,
1982), p. 14; John Travis, "Orthodox-Lutheran Relations: Their
Historical Beginnings" in Greek Orthodox Theological Review. 29 (1984),
p. 311; and Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A study of
the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the eve of the Turkish conquest
to the Greek War of Independence (London: Cambridge University Press,
1968) p. 165, 168.

[13] Calvin, Institutes,
4.63.2. It should be pointed out that Calvin's remarks come in his
general asservations against the pretense of "apostolic succession,"
rather than as a vote in favour of the eastern against the western
versions of the doctrine.

[15] As a matter of fact,
Biel acknowledged the primacy and supreme power of the Roman Pontiff,
but, in common with many other theologians of his time, maintained the
superiority of general councils, at least to the extent that they could
compel the pope's resignation. And he displayed no more theological
freedom than has been claimed and exercised by some of the strictest
theologians. Among the opinions defended by Biel concerning matters
controverted in his day, the following are worthy of mention: (a) That
all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, even that of bishops, is derived
either immediately or mediately from the pope. In this connection his
defence of the episcopal claims of Diether von Ysenburg won him thanks
of Pius II; (b) That the power of absolving is inherent in sacerdotal
orders, and that only the matter, i.e. the persons to be absolved, can
be conceded or withheld by the ordinary; (c) That the minister of
baptism need have no more specific intention than that of doing what
the faithful, that is, the Church, intends. (d) That the State may not
compel Jews, or "heathens," or their children to receive baptism. (e)
And that the Contractus Trinus is morally lawful. All of these opinions
have since become prevailing theological doctrine.
16 Gabriel Biel, "On the Circumcision of the Lord," text in Heiko
Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval
Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966) , p. 167.

[17] See, for example, among many passages, On Grace and Free Will (De gratia et libero arbitrio), xxx-xxxiii.

[18] Augustine argues however
that love is a good will that comes from God and not from ourselves;
love can thus be described as a capacity that comes from God. See De
gratia Christi et de peccato originali [On the Grace of Christ and
Original Sin], II.30. Ch.22 in St. Augustin's Anti-Pelagian Works,
trans. P. Holmes and R. E Wallis, Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers,
series 1 (Peabody: MA: Hendrikson, 1999 reprint of the 1887 Edinburgh
edition), p, 224a; further on the same topic, De gratia et libero
arbitrio [Of Grace and Free Will], chapters xxxiv-xxxix.

[19] Biel, "Circumcision," 167-168.

[20] Augustine identifies
love with the good will in his exegesis of 1 John 3.1, but he
distinguishes love and grace, as in De spiritu et littera [On the
Spirit and Letter], xxxiii-xxxiv, in Holmes, p. 110 a,b.

[21] Biel, "Circumcision," p. 167.

[22] Generally, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.iv.

[23] Biel, "Circumcision," p. 169.

[24] There are significant
exceptions: the Anabaptist Hans Denck's 1527 Treatise, "Concerning True
Love," is a lyrical and almost passionate defense of love as a "grace,"
on the model of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Devotio Moderna. "Love is
a spiritual power. The lover desires to be united with the beloved.
Where love is fulfilled, the lover does not objectify the beloved. The
lover forgets himself, as if he were no more, and without shame he
yearns for his beloved..." In D. Liechty, ed. Early Anabaptist
Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 112.

[26] Biel, "Circumcision,"
p. 168.. This is not unlike John of Damascus' view, when he says that
"without the Spirit there is no impulsion within God" (OF 196/ PG 148
B). The Spirit's personal character is to be dynamic. He personifies
the "one surge and the one movement of the three Persons" (OF 202/PG
152 B) that is God's very life. On John's dynamic-relational view of
the trinity, see Michael Torre, "St John of Damascus and St Thomas
Aquinas on the Eternal procession of the Holy Spirit," paper delivered
at the 27th International Medieval Studies Congress, Kalamazoo,
Michigan (1992), pp. 2-4. The Eastern fathers tended to be more precise
about the modes and operations within the trinity as a result of their
theology developing against a heresiological background. The scholastic
idiom by Biel's day tended to emphasize the three-in-oneness, God
giving himself as an entirety. A mediating western view is Aquinas, who
despite his defense of the filioque teaches that the Father is the only
unoriginate principle and that the Spirit proceeds from the Father
through the Son. He further accepts that the Spirit abides in the Son,
"as the lover rests in the beloved" (ST 36, 2 ad 4). For this reason,
he says that "the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father to the
Son" (QDP 10, 4 ad 10). He here follows Richard of St. Victor,
regarding the Father's love for the Son as the supreme love, a personal
love for another (QDP 9, 9 ad contra).

[27] As an "honorary"
precursor of medieval developments in western theology, see discussion
in F. Chase, ed., The Writings of St John of Damascus (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America, 1958), 5-9.

[28] The gift of love
described in the long digression of 1 Corinthians 13 has theoloigical
implications, but is best seen against the backdrop of particular
social issues-rich vs. poor, the "gifted" vs. the "ungifted"-rather
than as a meditation on divine love as such.

[29] en toutw teteleiwtai h agaph meth hmwn.

[30] V Ennead 2.26; in
Guthrie (trans.), Launching Points to the Realms of Mind (Grand Rapids:
Phanes, 1988), p. 45. The higher purifying virtues, needed to help the
soul become like God by removing from it as much as possible of that
which is of the senses; and the still higher deifying or enlightening
virtues, through the exercise of which man may attain to the
fulfillment of his true nature. But unification with the highest, with
God, is not possible through thought. It is attained only when the
soul, in an ecstatic state, loses the restraint of the body and has for
a time an immediate knowledge of God.

[32] "When unity makes the
ways complete, it is in unity that all will gather themselves, and it
is by acquaintance that all will purify themselves ouit of multiplicity
into unity, consuming matter within themselves as fire, and darkness by
light, and death by life. So since these things have happened to each
of us, it is fitting for us to meditate upon the entirety so that this
house might be holy, and quietly intent on unity." Gospel of Truth,
IV.23.7,8, 19-22; in Layton, p. 257. Cf 2 Cor. 5.4.

[33] GT 17.36; Layton, 254.

[34] As one of many examples,
the Barbelo Gnosticism of the Nag Hammadi treatise, "First Thought in
Three Forms," (Trimorphic Protennoia) dating from about the year 350.

[35] Marcion, as I have
argued elsewhere, can be distinguished from the Gnostic teachers
primarily in terms of the most widely attested of his views, namely,
his emphasis on the love expressed by the "supreme" God as the feature
differentiating him from the God of the Jews, whose love is deficient
and consists only in a raw sense of justice. Cf. Tertullian, Adv.
Marc., 1.23-24.

[37] A theme developed by Augustine as well in the treatise (De perfectione justiciae hominis) "On Righteousness," viii.19

[38] Gregory, "On the Soul,"
450; further (p. 451): "Such I think is the plight of the soul as well.
When the divine force, for God's very love for man, drags that which
belongs to him from the ruins of the irrational and material. Not in
hatred or revenge for a wicked life, to my thinking, does God bring
upon sinners those painful dispensations (of hell); he is only claiming
and drawing to himself whatever to please himn came into existence."

[39] In many respects the
work by Hans Jonas, now dated, remains the best conceptual treatment of
Gnostic themes and emphases; see The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1979).

[40] "On the Soul," p. 450b.

[41] On the liturgical uses
of Dionysius by his redactors in the Syrian (Jacobite) Church, see "The
Liturgy of St Dionysius," trans. J. Parker, in Liturgiarum Orientalis,
collectio E. Renaudoti, t. 2, p. 201. In the same work, Dionysius also
shows his distance from Gnosticism in his conventional emphasis on the
transforming powers of grace, the unworthiness of man (the subject),
and the role of the sacraments as vehicles of grace and forgiveness:

"Who callest the poor from the dust,
And raisest the beggar from the dunghill;
And hast called us, lost, rejected and infirm,
To the liberty and household dignity of Thy sons,
Through Thy beloved Son, grant to us,
That we may appear in Thy sight, holy sons,
And not unworthy of the name..."

[42] Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 1.3

[43] John 1.12, with its
reference to the power to become children of God already contains the
elements of "theosis," which is not to be equated with apophatic
mysticism at this stage of development.

[44] "Divine Names," 3.1

[45] Cement, Stromateis 5.11

[46] On the theme of unlikeness and incomprehensibility, among the pseudonymous letters see Letter I, To Gaius Therapeutes.

[47] Mystical theology V. The
use of collusio oppositorum is also a feature of Gnostic thought; cf.
"The Thunder" or "Perfect Mind," in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, pp.
77-78.

[48] "Divine Names," I.1f.

[49] "Divine Names," III.2

[50] Especially in Chapter 2,
where Dionysius argues that it is appropriate to reveal the mysteries
of God and of heaven with symbols without resemblance. Here it is
explained that the many images and symbols in sacred scripture are not
meant to be read literally. As man is incapable of contemplating Divine
Truth directly, our divinely inspired ancestors have left us symbols
adapted to our capacity of understanding which help us to raise our
consciousness to the understanding and contemplation of the divine
truths; the second function of the symbol is that it also serves as a
veil to these sacred truths for those who it would be imprudent to
reveal these things to. The value of the symbol therefore depends on
the person's capacity to penetrate its secrets.

[51] Mystical Theology, 3.1

[52] He speaks of three
"orders" of clergy; the hierarch (bishop) the priest (hereus), and the
deacon or Liturgist. Likewise, the laity are divided into catechumens,
baptized laymen, and monks.

[53] " Being incorporeal,
she unites with the body...According to her own life she modifies that
to which she is united but she is not modified thereby." Ammonius
Saccas, from Nemesius in K. Guthrie, trans., Porphyry's Launching
Points to the Realm of Mind (Grand Rapids, Phanes Presss), p 83.

[54] Thus Florovsky,
although a revisionist in terms of his sense of the use of the Fathers
and the Councils in ecclesiastical writing, writes as follows:
"'Following THE HOLY FATHERS" . . . It was usual in the Ancient Church
to introduce doctrinal statements by phrases like this. The Decree of
Chalcedon opens precisely with these very words. The Seventh Ecumenical
Council introduces its decision concerning the Holy Icons in a more
elaborate way: "Following the Divinely inspired teaching of the Holy
Fathers and the Tradition of the Catholic Church." The didaskalia of
the Fathers is the formal and normative term of reference." See Bible,
Church, Tradition (Vaduz, 1987), p. 105.

[55] Plato, Symposium, 202e-203a (Jowett's translation).

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There are too many errors in this book for unsophisticated readers. McLaren’s book has value only to readers who recognize the mistakes but are willing to learn about a position that springs from ideology and a theological framework. For me, the emerging church movement is enough to consider by itself without flawed economics intertwined